Vatican paper damns Da Vinci Code sequel with faint praise

The film adaptation of Angels and Demons, the sequel to the controversial The Da Vinci Code, is "innocuous entertainment" according to reviews published in the Vatican's semi-official newspaper.

Angels and Demons, which is released in the UK next week, was widely expected to antagonise the Vatican after The Da Vinci Code was described as a deliberate attempt to discredit the Roman Catholic church. It became one of 2006's biggest hits, taking £518m at the worldwide box office.

But this time round, the Vatican has taken a gentler approach. L'Osservatore Romano, an Italian daily that covers all the pope's public activities, chose instead to damn Angels and Demons with faint praise, saying it had a "modest quality that was saved only by the presence of Tom Hanks".

One of the reviewers, Lucetta Scaraffia, wrote: "In Angels and Demons, the church is on the side of the good guys, even if it pays the price of past imaginary brutalities. In The Da Vinci Code, the good guys, by contrast, were outside the church … so this second novel and film are innocuous by comparison."

Angels and Demons follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, played by Hanks, as he tries to stop the Illuminati, a secret society, from destroying Vatican City with the newly discovered power of antimatter.

The film's director, Ron Howard, said last week that church officials had stymied his attempts to film in and around Vatican City, a charge that was dismissed by the papal press secretary, Father Federico Lombardi, as a publicity stunt.

In Angels & Demons, one-eighth of a gram of antimatter is stolen from Cern in Switzerland by terrorists intent on using it to blow up the Vatican. Could such a plan actually work? David Cox investigates